Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (16 page)

The last two years that Anne and Sandy Koufax lived at Winkumpaugh Farm were the first in his life when he was bound by neither school nor work. After commuting from Maine during the summer of 1972 for his sixth season as a television commentator for NBC, he quit with four years left on his contract. He loathed the work. He could tell you every pitch thrown by every pitcher in a game without having written anything down, but there was a problem: He didn’t like to talk about himself. At a meeting before Game 5 of the 1970 World Series, fellow announcer Joe Garagiola noted that Cincinnati’s starting pitcher, Jim Merritt, had an injured arm. “I said, ‘Sandy, what a perfect thing to talk about. That’s what you had, too.’” Garagiola says. “But he said he didn’t want to talk about himself. He wouldn’t do it.”

“Every time he had to leave Maine to work one of those games, it broke his heart,” says MaJo Keleshian, a friend and former neighbor who attended Sarah Lawrence College with Anne. She still lives without a television on land she and her husband bought from Koufax. “He was very happy here. He came here to be left alone.”

Since then only his address has changed—and many times, at that. Joe DiMaggio, baseball’s other legendary protector of privacy, was practically Rodmanesque compared with Koufax. DiMaggio was regal, having acquired even the stiff-handed wave of royalty. We watched the graying of DiMaggio as he played TV pitchman and public icon. Koufax is a living James Dean, the aura of his youth frozen in time; he has grayed without our even knowing it. He is a sphinx, except that he doesn’t want anyone to try to solve his riddle.

Koufax was the kind of man boys idolized, men envied, women swooned over and rabbis thanked, especially when he refused to pitch Game 1 of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur. And when he was suddenly, tragically, done with baseball, he slipped into a life nearly monastic in its privacy.

One question comes to mind: Why? Why did he turn his back on Fame and Fortune, the twin sirens of celebrity? Why did the most beloved athlete of his time carve out a quiet life—the very antithesis of the American dream at the close of the century? For the answer I will go searching for the soul of Sandy Koufax, which seems as mysterious as the deepest Maine woods on a moonless night.

BOB BALLARD is a retiree in Vero Beach, Fla., who works part time as a security guard at Dodgertown, the sleepiest spring training site in all of baseball. Sometime around 1987 he told the secretary for Peter O’Malley, then the owner of the Dodgers, how much he would enjoy getting an autograph from Koufax for his birthday. A few days later Koufax, working for the Dodgers as a roving pitching instructor, handed Ballard an autographed ball and said, “Happy birthday.”

Every year since then, on or about Ballard’s birthday, Koufax has brought the old man an autographed ball. Koufax delivered on schedule this year for Ballard’s 79th birthday. “He’s a super, super guy,” says Ballard. “Very courteous. A real gentleman. A lot nicer than these players today.”

It is a lovely day for golf. I am standing in the tiny pro shop of the Bucksport (Maine) Golf Club, a rustic, nine-hole track. The parking lot is gravel. Even the rates are quaint: $15 to play nine holes, $22 for 18, and you are instructed to play the white tees as the front nine, then the blue tees as the back nine. There is no valet parking, no tiny pyramids of Titleists on the scrubby range, no M
EMBERS
O
NLY
signs, no attitude. This is Koufax’s kind of place. I am standing in the imprint of his golf spikes, a quarter-century removed. He was a member of the Bucksport Golf Club, one of its more enthusiastic members.

It wasn’t enough that he play golf, he wanted to be good enough to win amateur tournaments. Koufax was working on the engine of a tractor one day when a thought came to him about a certain kind of grip for a golf club. He dropped his tools, dashed into his machine shop, fiddled with a club and then raced off to the Bucksport range. He was still wearing dungaree shorts and a grease-splattered shirt when he arrived. “That’s how dedicated to the game he was,” says Gene Bowden, one of his old playing partners.

Koufax diligently whittled his handicap to a six and entered the 1973 Maine State Amateur. He advanced to the championship flights by draining a 30-foot putt on the 18th hole. He missed the next cut, though, losing on the last hole of a playoff.

Koufax is exacting in every pursuit. Ron Fairly, one of his Dodgers roommates, would watch with exasperation as Koufax, dressed suavely for dinner in glossy alligator shoes, crisply pressed slacks and a fruit-colored alpaca sweater, would fuss over each hair in his sideburns. “Reservation’s in 15 minutes, and it’s a 20-minute ride,” Fairly would announce, and Koufax would go right on trimming until his sideburns were in perfect alignment.

He brought that same meticulousness to Maine. It wasn’t enough to dabble in carpentry and home electronics—he built and installed a sound system throughout the house. It wasn’t enough to cook—he became a gourmet cook, whipping up dishes not by following recipes but by substituting ingredients and improvising by
feel
. Later in life it wasn’t enough to jog; he ran a marathon. He didn’t just take up fishing, he moved to Idaho for some of the best salmon fishing in the world. He defines himself by the fullness of his life and the excellence he seeks in every corner of it, not the way the rest of the word defines him: through the narrow prism of his career as a pitcher. “I think he pitched for the excellence of it,” Keleshian says. “He didn’t set out to beat someone or make anyone look bad. He used himself as his only measure of excellence. And he was that way in everything he did. He was a fabulous cook, but he was almost never quite satisfied. He’d say, ‘Ah, it needs a little salt or a little oregano, or something.’ Once in a great while he’d say, ‘Ah-ha! That’s it!’”

Walt Disney, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Darryl Zanuck and all the other Hollywood stars who held Dodgers season tickets when Koufax was the biggest star in America never came to Winkumpaugh Farm. The fans never came, either, though a fat sack of fan mail arrived every week, even seven years after he last threw a pitch. The place was perfect, all right. He could move about without fuss, without having to talk about his least favorite subject: himself. “He did say once that he’d rather not talk baseball and his career,” Bowden says. “And we never did.”

“WHEN HIDEO NOMO was getting really, really big, Sandy told me, ‘He’d better learn to like room service,’” O’Malley says. “That’s how Sandy handled the attention.” Koufax almost never left his hotel room in his final two seasons for the Dodgers. It wasn’t enough that he move to a creaky, charmingly flawed farmhouse in Maine with a leaky basement, he quickly bought up almost 300 acres adjacent to it.

Not even the serenity of Maine, though, could quell Koufax’s wanderlust. After three years he decided the winters were too long and too cold. The farmhouse needed constant work. His stepfather took ill in California. Koufax sold Winkumpaugh Farm on July 22, 1974, leaving for the warmer but still rural setting of Templeton, Calif., in San Luis Obispo County.

Koufax is 63, in terrific shape and, thanks to shoulder surgery a few years back, probably still able to get hitters out. (In his 50s Koufax was pitching in a fantasy camp when a camper scoffed after one of his pitches, “Is that all you’ve got?” Koufax’s lips tightened and his eyes narrowed—just about all the emotion he would ever show on the mound—and he unleashed a heater that flew damn near 90 mph.)

The romance with Anne ended with a divorce in the early ’80s. He remarried a few years later, this time to a fitness enthusiast who, like Anne, had a passion for the arts. That marriage ended in divorce last winter. Friends say Koufax is delighted to be on his own again. Says Lou Johnson, a former Dodgers teammate, “He has an inner peace that’s really deep-rooted. I wish I had that.”

He is the child of a broken marriage who rejected everything associated with his father, including his name. Sanford Braun was three years old when Jack and Evelyn Braun divorced, and his contact with Jack all but ended about six years later when Jack remarried and stopped sending alimony payments. Evelyn, an accountant, married Irving Koufax, an attorney, a short time later. “When I speak of my father,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I speak of Irving Koufax, for he has been to me everything a father could be.” Koufax rarely spoke to Jack Braun, and not at all during his playing days. When the Dodgers played at Shea Stadium, Jack would sit a few rows behind the visitors’ dugout and cheer for the son who neither knew nor cared that he was there.

Now there is but one Koufax bearing that name. He has no children, no immediate family—both his mother and stepfather are deceased. The death of his only sibling, a sister, in 1997, had a profound impact on a man who has struggled to deal with the deaths of friends and other players from his era. “People react to death differently,” O’Malley says. “Sandy takes a death very, very, very hard.”

He has a small circle of close friends, and many other buddies who always seem to be one or two phone numbers behind him. “It sounds odd, but he’s very home-oriented,” Keleshian says, “yet very nomadic.”

His list of home addresses since he stopped playing baseball reads like a KOA campground directory: North Ellsworth, Maine; Templeton and Santa Barbara, Calif.; Idaho; Oregon (where his second wife ran a gallery); North Carolina (where he and his second wife kept horses); and Vero Beach—not to mention extensive trips to Hawaii, New Zealand and Europe. This spring he was looking for a new place to spend the summer and once again had his eye on rural New England. “He doesn’t say much about what he’s up to,” says Bobby McCarthy, a friend who owns a Vero Beach restaurant that Koufax prefers to frequent when it’s closed. “We’ll be sitting in the restaurant in the morning, and that night I’ll see he’s at a Mets game in New York. And he hadn’t said anything that morning about going there. But that’s Sandy.”

At 8:30 on a lovely Sunday morning in March, I attend a chapel service in the Sandy Koufax Room at Dodgertown. Players and coaches in their fabulously white Dodgers uniforms are there, but not Koufax. The Dodgers give glory to Jesus Christ every Sunday in a conference room named for the greatest Jewish ballplayer who ever lived. Outside the room is a picture of a young Koufax, smiling, as if he is in on the joke.

DON SUTTON is a native of Clio, Ala., who reached the big leagues at age 21 in 1966, which is to say he got there just in time. His first season in the majors was Koufax’s last. Says Sutton, “I saw how he dressed, how he tipped, how he carried himself and knew that’s how a big leaguer was supposed to act. He was a star who didn’t feel he was a star. That’s a gift not many people have.”

Tommy Hutton, who grew up in Los Angeles, also made his big league debut for the Dodgers in ’66, entering the game in the ninth inning at first base as Koufax finished off the Pirates 5–1 on Sept. 16. Says Hutton, now a broadcaster for the Marlins, “I’ll never forget this. After the game he came up to me and said, ‘Congratulations.’ Ever since then, I’ve always made it a point to congratulate a guy when he gets into his first game.”

I AM STANDING in a tunnel under the stands behind home plate at Dodger Stadium on a clear summer night in 1998. Koufax is about 75 feet in front of me, seated on a folding chair on the infield while the Dodgers honor Sutton with the retirement of his number before a game against the Braves. When the program ends, Sutton and all his guests—former Dodgers Ron Cey and Steve Garvey among them—march past me toward an elevator that will take them to a stadium suite. All except Koufax. He is gone. Vanished. I find out later that as soon as the ceremony was over, he arose from his chair, walked briskly into the Dodgers dugout and kept right on going, into the team parking lot and off into the night. “That’s Sandy,” said one team official. “We call him the Ghost.”

I am searching for an apparition. I never saw Koufax pitch, never felt the spell he held over America. I had just turned six when Koufax walked into the Sansui room of the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel on Nov. 18, 1966, to announce his retirement from baseball. To have missed his brilliance heightens the fascination. For me he is black-and-white newsreel footage shot from high behind home plate, and an inexhaustible supply of statistics that border on the absurd. A favorite: Every time he took the mound, Koufax was twice as likely to throw a shutout as he was to hit a batter.

Koufax was 30 years old when he quit. Women at the press conference cried. Reporters applauded him, then lined up for his autograph. The world, including his teammates, was shocked. In the last 26 days of his career, including a loss in the 1966 World Series, Koufax started seven times, threw five complete-game wins and had a 1.07 ERA. He clinched the pennant for Los Angeles for the second straight year with a complete game on two days rest. Everyone knew he was pitching with traumatic arthritis in his left elbow, but how bad could it be when he pitched like that?

It was this bad: Koufax couldn’t straighten his left arm—it was curved like a parenthesis. He had to have a tailor shorten the left sleeve on all his coats. Use of his left arm was severely limited when he wasn’t pitching. On bad days he’d have to bend his neck to get his face closer to his left hand so that he could shave. And on the worst days he had to shave with his right hand. He still held his fork in his left hand, but sometimes he had to bend closer to the plate to get the food into his mouth.

His elbow was shot full of cortisone several times a season. His stomach was always queasy from the cocktail of anti-inflammatories he swallowed before and after games, which he once said made him “half-high on the mound.” He soaked his elbow in an ice bath for 30 minutes after each game, his arm encased in an inner tube to protect against frostbite. And even then his arm would swell an inch. He couldn’t go on like this, not when his doctors could not rule out the possibility that he was risking permanent damage to his arm.

Not everyone was shocked when Koufax quit. In August 1965 he told Phil Collier, a writer for
The San Diego Union-Tribune
to meet him in a room off the Dodgers’ clubhouse. Koufax and Collier often sat next to each other on the team’s charter flights, yapping about politics, the economy or literature. “Next year’s going to be my last year,” Koufax told Collier. “The damn thing’s all swelled up. And I hate taking the pills. They slow my reactions. I’m afraid someone’s going to hit a line drive that hits me in the head.”